Love him or hate him, Michael Robertson tends to get a fair bit of press where music is concerned. He is the founder and former CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com. He is currently the CEO of music locker company MP3tunes. Not exactly the sort of guy you can ignore. You can sue him from here to eternity, and the major labels have, but you can’t ignore him.

So when he wrote a guest post for TechCrunch last month, I posted it in the Balanced Copyright Facebook Group. It was definitely newsworthy, even if it wasn’t what they would want to hear.

What I wasn’t expecting was that anyone would respond, and that in responding, they would effectively tell me what they thought, and why they thought it. Here’s what I posted, and the responses, in order. The original is here, and if they suffer an attack of common sense and decide to delete anything I’ve printed it out as a PDF, and uploaded it here as evidence.

Amazon defied the record labels by launching an unlicensed personal cloud music service. (Disclosure: I’m CEO of competitor MP3tunes.) Music companies immediately expressed their dissatisfaction and Amazon public stated they would discuss licenses with labels. Since then considerable speculation has

Jeff Thistle What measures do you propose be put in place to prevent the uploading of major label owned content? I can’t speak to the mechanism to determine what an annual fee would be (presumably it would be by percentage of catalogue * number of lockers that the content resides in), but asking that controls be put in place to prevent the service from becoming another illegal sharing vehicle is *very* reasonable.

Wayne Joseph Borean There are people who read the Group who don’t know who you are. For that matter, and to be honest, I should tell you that I’m working for Semi Accurate this week. Next week, hell, who knows.

April 30 at 9:10am · Like

The point being that Jeff Thistle, who works for EMI, doesn’t give a damn if he collects money for works that were written, played, and recorded by independent artists. He is fine with that. In the real world, we would call that theft.

The Major Labels want a system that will allow them to collect money for every music track in every music locker. It doesn’t matter that those tracks were recorded by independent artists. It doesn’t matter that the labels have no contractual rights of any sort to that music. They want to collect the money anyway.

This is called rent seeking. It’s like Microsoft wanting to collect their money on every PC sold. It doesn’t matter that the PC that I bought last month will never have the Broken Operating System installed on it. Microsoft wants to collect the money, without doing the work. It’s the same with the labels. They don’t want to do the work, but they want to collect the cash.

If they can lock in the ability to charge for every single song in every single locker now, they can partially prevent the damage that will come when they start loosing court cases. And lose them they will. The United States Congress passed the 1976 Copyright Act with language specifically giving artists the right to retrieve copyright ownership. The letters from the Artists have already started to arrive at the Record Labels, and in 2013 the court cases start. There’s only eighteen months to go. The Record Labels are terrified…

And now you know why the Record Labels want to charge for every song in every locker, even if they have no rights to that song. It’s called guaranteeing a revenue stream. Who cares if it’s theft? They don’t.

7 Responses to The Major Labels Think That They Own The Independent Artists – Do They?

Why? It was accurate (and by the way, I have the entirety of the Balanced Copyright Facebook Groups posts saved to my backup drive – which is really useful since the group was taken down).

I never, ever, take something down. I do apologize if I’m inaccurate, but in this case, I’m not. I may have misunderstood you, but you did post those exact words. Hell, it is what you implied.

I don’t know what you were really thinking. I’m not a mind reader. I am however a writer and editor. I get paid for doing this, and I know the English language.

Just curious – it’s over two years later. I know you were aware at the time that I’d posted this. Why are you concerned about it now?

You do realize that there are copies of this particular post in a variety of places, which I do NOT control. It got picked up by a bunch of people at the time, and I’m not sure who all copied it, or if those copies are still online. I know that a bunch of my stuff got translated into Russian and Spanish, and this particular post may have been included.

You said what you said. You’ve never explained to me how you were going to be able to implement a reliable system to determine who owned what. You never explained why the industry should get a share out of every cyber music locker.

Go ahead. Give us some details. Remember that I used to work as a computer programmer, and that I’ve also worked as a Major Accounts Sales Representative, and used to sell to companies a lot bigger than EMI on a regular basis.